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Marx and Engels's theory of history. Making sense of the race factor.

van Ree, E.

Published in:Journal of Political Ideologies

DOI:10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094

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Citation for published version (APA):van Ree, E. (2019). Marx and Engels's theory of history. Making sense of the race factor. Journal of PoliticalIdeologies, 24(1), 54-73. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094

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Download date: 29 May 2020

Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of therace factorErik van Ree

Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory ofhistory contained racist components. In Marx and Engels’s under-standing, racial disparities emerged under the influence of sharednatural and social conditions hardening into heredity and of themixing of blood. They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities,nations and social classes, while endowing themwith innate superiorand inferior character traits. They regarded race as part of humanity’snatural conditions, upon which the production system rested. ‘Races’endowed with superior qualities would boost economic develop-ment and productivity, while the less endowed ones would holdhumanity back. Marxist race thinking reflected common Lamarckianand Romantic-Nationalist assumptions of the era.

This article explores the racist components in the thought of Karl Marx and of FriedrichEngels. Their numerous horrendous comments on Slavs, ‘Negroes’, Bedouins, Jews,Chinese and many others are well known, but the logic behind these comments has notbeen sufficiently examined.

Marx and Engels applied the term Rasse, or the English race, to a wide variety of humancollectives – from skin-colour groups to ethnicities, nations and even to social classes. It istempting to assume that they were applying the term loosely and that they were onlyunthinkingly repeating the stereotypes and prejudices of the day. On the contrary, I willargue that this common interpretation means to miss the serious points they were making.Whereas formal definitions and theories of race indeed cannot be found in their writings,their scattered comments add up to quite a coherent position on the question.

Let me state at the outset that I will not take a position in the old debate about thedegree of identity of views between Marx and Engels; this article is not intended as acontribution to that debate. My conclusion on the issue at hand will be that both menwere racializing human collectives but that they did not see completely eye to eye on thequestion of the emergence of race.

The subject of Marx, Engels and racism remains a difficult one. Intellectually, it iscounter-intuitive to assume that the authors of a worldview defining production andclass as history’s motive forces could have nurtured racist assumptions in any seriousway. Politically, too, this is a fraught issue. The fact that Marx and Engels continue to becontroversial figures easily stands in the way of balanced conclusions. Carlos Moore’s

CONTACT Erik van Ree e.vanree@uva.nl

JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 54–73https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

and Nathaniel Weyl’s unconvincing characterizations of the founding fathers of mod-ern communism as racists of the Aryanist type, and racists first and foremost, are casesin point.1

The issue is particularly problematic for scholars of the Marxist persuasion. Theirplight might be compared to that of present-day Lutherans who somehow must cometo terms with the anti-Semitic outbursts of the founder. It would be unfair to accuse theMarxists of covering up Marx’s and Engels’s derogatory and abusive language. On thecontrary, they roundly condemn it.2 The problem with Marxist analysis lies rather in itsfailure to make intellectual sense of Marx’s and Engels’s views of race. Most effort isinvested in showing what these views were not; it is held that they were mereFremdkörper, elements incompatible with the overall drift of the two men’s thinking.The question of how we should interpret their racist observations, apart from theirbeing troubling and disturbing, remains largely unanswered.

This intellectually thin way of handling the problem was pioneered by theAustromarxist Otto Bauer, who in 1907 rejected Engels’s view that the small nationsof the Habsburg Empire were doomed always to remain ‘nations without history’. Bauerinsisted that Engels’s writings against the South Slavs were incompatible with thematerialist method Engels himself had pioneered with Marx.3 Roman Rosdolsky,Michael Löwy and Kevin Anderson follow in Bauer’s footsteps. These scholars suggestthat Marx’s and Engels’s abusive comments on the South Slavs and on other nationsand races were either politically motivated ad hoc products or residues of Hegelianidealism. No effort is spent on further exploring the logic behind these comments,which only makes sense if there is no underlying logic in the first place.4

In an exceptional Marxist contribution, Ephraim Nimni argues that Engels’s treat-ment of the South Slavs was compatible with the materialist worldview. Nimni reinter-prets Engels’s shocking outbursts in socioeconomic and demographic terms. The latter’sreal point would have been that the small size and peasant nature of some of theCentral-European nations prevented these nations from establishing economicallyviable nation-states and therefore doomed them to play a counter-revolutionary rolein history.5 Nimni’s point is a valid one but, on the downside, this scholar makes theracist aspects of Engels’s argumentation disappear from view altogether, and we are nocloser to understanding them than we were.6

The Marxist sociology of race, race relations and racism focuses on the question ofhow historical materialism can be made to serve the study of these phenomena in thecontemporary world. There is little to no discussion of Marx’s own views of race in thisliterature.7

To make theoretical sense of the racist elements in Marx and Engels, two problemsmust be addressed. First of all, how could they have found a place in history for race, ifclass and production came first? To my knowledge, Weyl stands alone in having offereda solution for this problem. This author suggested that ‘historical materialism might besuperimposed on certain more fundamental conditions which shaped man’s fate’. IfMarx assumed that people of different races differed in ‘ability and hence in civilization-potential’, then ‘The more capable peoples would be expected to move more swiftlythrough the dialectically determined phases of the historical process and this would inturn stimulate their civilizational level’.8 Weyl suggests, in other words, that Marx

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regarded race as an element underlying the economic basis of society. I will return tothis extraordinarily fruitful suggestion later on.9

Second, all this remains speculation as long as it remains unclear whether Marxcould have believed in the reality of racial communities with hereditarily defined‘civilization-potential’ at all. Fortunately, this is a question that has been discussed inthe literature at some length.

In Solomon Bloom’s reading, Marx regarded racial–ethnic character traits not asimmutable or inborn but as a product of economic and other environmental factorsand permanently in flux, which is why he could not have been very concerned with raceand biology.10 Iring Fetscher acknowledges that Marx accepted inborn racial character-istics, but he would have been little concerned with them, as he believed inborndifferences in due course would be erased.11 If Marx and Engels made the humancharacter flexible and dependent on the environment, racism seems to be ruled out. YetM.M. Bober and Diane Paul suggest that, if human nature could be moulded byenvironmental factors, so could, possibly, the underlying human heredity. Thus, inMarx’s imagination, it is precisely the environment that might have been instrumentalin creating hereditary racial communities.12

Paul concludes that Marx and Engels were neither ‘extreme racists’ nor ‘anti-racists’. Their use of biology remained ‘sporadic, ad hoc and sometimes inconsistent’.But in her reading, they did share the ‘typical attitudes of nineteenth-centuryEuropeans’, for whom it was normal to link a hierarchy of cultures to a biologicalsubstrate.13 Amy Martin characterizes Engels’s assessments of the Irish nationalcharacter in his 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England, as biological‘racialism’.14 Regina Roth argues that Engels treated the Irish national character as aproduct of history, while at the same time believing that national character ‘turnedinto “nature”’ in the course of time.15 Thus, the existing scholarly literature suggeststhat Marx and Engels could have prioritized environment and yet have believed inhereditary race.

For a final important introductory observation, undeniably Marx’s and Engels’sremarks on race are scattered and unsystematic. But there are very many, andtheir mutual coherence is strong enough to suggest an underlying, reconstructableview.

The weight of these remarks is increased in that they are scattered over all types ofthe two men’s writings. They are found not only in private correspondence and inworks that remained unpublished during their lifetimes, such as The German Ideology.16

Race also appears in journalistic articles and in major published works such as Marx’sCapital, and Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, his so-called Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I found nosignificant differences in the treatment of race between these various types of sourcesnor, for that matter, did I detect any fundamental shift in their views on race asexpressed over time.

This article will not explore the question of Marx’s and Engels’s anti-Semitism.Obviously, this question overlaps with the racism issue, but it has its own ramifications.It would require more space than available here to be treated with the seriousness that itdeserves.

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Racism: the definition

The term ‘racism’ postdates Marx and Engels. It came in use only in the twentiethcentury.17 But what we now conceptualize as racism was in full bloom in the Westernworld during their lifetimes. The 1967 UNESCO ‘Statement on Race and RacialPrejudice’ defined racism as ‘arranging groups hierarchically in terms of psychologicaland cultural characteristics that are immutable and innate’.18 According to this defini-tion, to be adhered to here, racism is about the attribution of innate inferior andsuperior character traits to human groups.19

Classically, racism works under the assumption that certain superficial phenotypicalcharacteristics such as skin colour are hereditarily correlated with inferior or superiorcharacter traits. But the definition used here allows other, non-skin-colour types ofgroups, such as ethnicities or even social classes, to be made subject to ‘racialization’ aswell.20 Then again, in all instances, for racism to be the case, the character traitsattributed to human groups must be imagined as innately inscribed in the very bodiesand brains of their members. Without that, even extreme prejudice towards particulargroups does not add up to racism. What is now often referred to as ‘cultural racism’deserves that name only if cultural communities are endowed with natural essencesinnate in them, through some sort of semi-biological mechanism.21

The late-twentieth-century problematic of cultural racism is quite relevant for ourdiscussion of Marx and Engels, as they were commenting as much on ethnic andnational character as on the alleged qualities of skin-colour groups. The definitionmakes collective character, furthermore, immutable. It is important to see that, in anineteenth-century context, immutable and innate are not strictly the same things.

In his 1859 Origin of Species, Charles Darwin explained that favourable character-istics increase the chances of survival of individual members of a species and wouldtherefore tend to become predominant within that species. But he could not explainhow new characteristics emerge in the first place. According to a hypothesis widespreadat the time, organisms adapt to the environment and thus acquired characteristicsbecome hereditary. The environmental hypothesis is famously associated with Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, but many scholars, even Darwin, were open to it.22 Applied tohumans, the Lamarckian hypothesis suggested that cultural adaptations, i.e. learnedbehaviour, might in due course become hereditary too. In Paul’s words, it was widelybelieved that ‘a human population which maintained a unity of language and culturewould become a race’. Nations were regarded as ‘races in the process of formation’.23

But the Lamarckian process has no end point: the environment will always continueto require new adaptations. The Lamarckian variety of racism, then, regards races asimmutable only in a relative sense. The shared, collective character of human groups isnot really immutable; it will undergo transformations. However, these processes willalways end in a corresponding recasting of the biological substrate, thus all the time re-rooting character in a new innate hereditary basis.

Racism: skin colour, ethnicity, nation

Scientific racism originated in the eighteenth century as a product of the Enlightenment.Carl Linnaeus, the Count of Buffon, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, followed in the

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early nineteenth century by Georges Cuvier, used skin-colour variations to classify human-ity into a limited number of races endowed with specific characters and to be rankedhierarchically – white on top and black at the bottom. The inferior races were regarded asdegenerations emerging from particular environmental and social conditions.Environmental factors held responsible for racial variety and degeneration included theclimate, geography, nutrition patterns, lifestyle and racial intermixtures. These early racetheoreticians however held on to the biblical monogenetic view of one human species withone common origin.

In Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of the monogenetic hypothesis, the commonhuman essence consisted of potentialities selectively activated by the environment.Once formed, races become fixed. Kant too distinguished superior and inferior races.By the mid-nineteenth century, Lamarck had become the monogeneticists’ most usedmodel.

An alternative, polygenic theory, formulated in the late eighteenth century by LordKames and shared by David Hume, Voltaire and Saint-Simon among others, positedseparate origins of human skin-colour races. Polygenists had no place for the environ-ment and for the notion of degeneration: racial hierarchy was humanity’s birthmark. Ashumans of different ‘races’ can procreate and have fertile offspring, it was difficult todefine races as separate species, but the polygenists came close. Polygenism becamedominant only after the mid-nineteenth century. Also in the mid-century, Robert Knox,the Count of Gobineau, and others began to promote racial purity and to treat race asthe single most important motive force of history.24

Popular-ethnic communities became tainted by race too. In the late eighteenthcentury, Johann Gottfried von Herder defined nations as products of ethnic mergersand he rejected the idea of skin-colour groups as races. Even so, Herder’s viewpoint,which became highly influential among the German Romantics, accommodated racistinterpretations. Herder endowed each nation with a distinctive character of its own.And while he did not rank national characters hierarchically, he did make them innateand essentially immutable.25

Romantic national diversitarianism came to dominate the early nineteenth-centurynational-revivalist movements.26 The Romantic turn was accompanied by a closeinterest in the ethno-tribal stocks out of whose merger nations supposedly hadgrown. Romantic nationalists did not clearly distinguish nation and race and oftenused the terms interchangeably. The defining character traits of particular ethnic stockswere often essentialized as innate. Joep Leerssen refers to a ‘racial-comparativeparadigm’.27 What is more, Romantic diversitarianism was soon reinterpreted hier-archically. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, the republican Giuseppe Mazzini, and theliberal John Stuart Mill classified nations on the basis of the question of whether or notthey were viable and capable of independent state-formation. Small nations lacking thatpotential were of inferior quality.28

Race as a natural condition

Turning now to Marx and Engels, the first thing to be cleared up is how they could havehad a place for race at all, if they regarded production and class as the primary motiveforces of history. If race meant anything to them, it must have been tied in to that

58 E. VAN REE

theoretical framework. I have located six important passages in their works highlightingthe general significance of race. As we are dealing with scattered remarks, let me presentthem as such.

(1) In The German Ideology’s section about Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx and Engels assertthat the ‘first precondition of all human history’ is the ‘corporeal organisation’ of‘living human individuals’. That includes the individuals’ ‘physical quality[Beschaffenheit]’ as well as the ‘natural conditions [Naturbedingungen], the geologi-cal, orohydrographical, climatic and other conditions’. A deleted passage added:‘These conditions determine not only the original, natural organisation of people,particularly the racial disparities, but also their whole further development’. The textthen continues: ‘All history writing must start with these natural foundations’.29

(2) In the Max Stirner section, The German Ideology asserts that the ‘developmentalpotential’ of children was crippled by the ‘present social conditions’, which‘emerged in history and can just as well be historically abolished again. Eventhe natural differences between species, such as distinctions between races [. . .]can and must be eliminated in history’.30

(3) In 1857, Marx noted down for himself that a number of points must never beforgotten when writing about production. Among these points was the followingone: ‘The natural conditions [Naturbestimmtheit] are, of course, the startingpoint; subjective and objective. Tribes, races etc.’31

(4) Again, Marx wrote the following in the 1867 first volume of Capital: ‘Notcounting the more or less developed form of social production, the productivityof labour continues to be tied to natural conditions. These are all traceable to thenature of man himself, race etc., and to nature surrounding him’.32

(5) In the work’s third volume, compiled by Engels from texts written in 1863–1867,Marx observed that ‘under the influence of numerous different empirical cir-cumstances, natural conditions, racial conditions [Racenverhältnisse], extrinsichistorical influences etc., the same economic basis [. . .] can become operative inendless variations and shades’.33 A few pages on we read ‘The possibility of adegree of economic development is given here, though of course depending onfavourable circumstances, hereditary [angebornen] racial character, etc.’34

(6) Finally, in a letter to W. Borgius dated 25 January 1894, Engels noted that ‘Underthe economic conditions [Verhältnissen] we also count the geographical basis,upon which these rest [sich abspielen]’. He continued: ‘We see the economicconditions as the ultimately determining element in the historical process[Entwicklung]. But race is itself an economic factor’.35

These observations, written down over a period of almost 50 years, are remarkablyconsistent, and without obvious disparities between Marx’s and Engels’s views. Theirjoint key idea was that the production system rests upon certain ‘natural conditions’.Importantly, this left the logic of historical materialism intact: the hypothesis of thenatural conditions does not affect the economic sphere’s primacy in relation to philo-sophical, legal, political and other ideas and institutions. It is only that the economicsphere itself was again seen to be resting upon a natural foundation, the true groundlevel of the human structure.

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This idea was consonant with the whole drift of Marx’s work. In his 1844 Parismanuscripts, he famously defined humanity as an ‘active natural being’, fitted out ‘withnatural powers, with vital powers’.36 It was these natural powers that Marx laterredefined as humanity’s productive forces.37 In his 1875 critique of the social-demo-cratic programme adopted in the German city of Gotha, he angrily dismissed the idea oflabour as sole source of wealth, the other source being nature. Marx added that humanlabour power itself was ‘only the expression of a force of nature [Naturkraft]’.38 Marxconceptualized production as an active, living extension of nature.

And that is where race came in. In nineteenth-century usage, the term race couldrefer to any sort of human collective of sufficient numbers – nations, inhabitants of aparticular region, lineages or even social classes. Marx and Engels followed this broadusage.39 The mere fact that they referred to a particular group of people as a race istherefore hardly significant and certainly cannot serve to impute ‘racist’ motives tothem. The point, however, is that the human groups they referred to as ‘races’ acquiredbiologically defined identities under their hands and came to differ in economicpotential.

Given that they consistently correlated race with natural conditions, it cannotreasonably be maintained that Marx and Engels were using the term without anyspecific meaning attached to it. Obviously, they were referring to humans in theirspecific capacity of natural, i.e. biological beings.40 In good accordance with theLamarckian spirit of the times, they regarded race as human adaptations tosurrounding natural conditions.41 They would have thought of races as the mod-ifications of the human material, emerging due to geological, climatic and otherfactors.

This understanding of race as biological variety is supported by an interestingpassage in The German Ideology, where we have the two friends acknowledging thatnations too have a biological aspect to them. They described the nation, here referred toas the state, as an ‘illusionary community’, but which always rested on the ‘real basis ofthe ties existing within each conglomerate of families and tribes, such as flesh and blood,language, division of labor’.42

At the same time, Marx and Engels conceptualized race as part of the naturalconditions, i.e. as the subjective aspect of these conditions upon which productionrested. That again allowed them to endow race with an active role in history. They werequite explicit in indicating that the productivity of labour and general economicdevelopment partly depended on a country’s racial conditions; some races would bemore naturally capable of boosting production than others.

Finally, in a paradox, while Marx called racial character hereditary in so manywords, he and Engels accepted at the same time that social changes would result inthe elimination of racial disparities at some point in the future. Race was thus fixedin heredity and in flux. As explained earlier, this apparent incoherence makesperfect sense in the context of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the environmentalimpact on heredity. Marx’s and Engels preoccupation with conditions spawningracial variation furthermore strongly suggests their acceptance of the monogenetichypothesis.

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The emergence of races: conditions

Marx and Engels did not see completely eye to eye when it came to the precise way inwhich humanity’s conditions spawn racial differentiation. Whereas Marx was mostimpressed by the direct influence of the natural environment, Engels was more inter-ested in the impact of factors related to the social order, such as nutrition patterns andculture impacting on heredity.43 But the latter was also extraordinarily fascinated by theeffects of the purely biological mixing of blood.

In a letter dated 24 June 1865, Marx informed Engels of the Polish ethnographerFranciszek Henryk Duchiński’s hypothesis that the Russians were no Slavs and did notbelong to the ‘Indo-Germanic race’ but were really Mongols and Finns. Marx suggestedthat this was somehow tied in to the fact that, ‘from the geological and hydrographicalangle’, Asia begins east of the river Dnepr. Marx hoped Duchiński was right.44

This intimation had a follow-up in 1866, when he and Engels carried on a fascinatingdiscussion by correspondence about the French ethnographer, Pierre Trémaux’s, 1865book Origine et transformations de l’homme et des autres êtres (‘Origin and transforma-tions of man and of the other beings’). Marx believed Trémaux had explained whatDarwin failed to explain, i.e. the process of the ‘differentiation’ and ‘degeneration’ oforganisms: the single most important factor was the ‘condition of the soil[Erdformation]’. Marx continued that all this was very relevant for human history:‘Here we have the natural basis for particular questions such as nationality’. The samesoil would always produce ‘the same nature, the same faculties’. Marx believed, forexample, that the Russian soil ‘Tartarizes’ the Slavs. He also suggested that the soil hadcaused the degeneration of an earlier, higher ‘Negro type’ into the present ‘nasty[gemeine]’ one.45

Marx’s use of the degeneration thesis once again suggests his adherence to themonogenetic hypothesis. Also, importantly, he discussed ethnicities (Slavs and Tatars)in the same racial terms as skin-colour groups. In his first response, Engels rejected thewhole idea as nonsense: as if the soil could turn white people into ‘idiots and niggers’!46

Marx was quick to admit that ‘historical modifications’ of the soil due to ‘various modesof production’ must be taken into account: for instance, chemical transformationsinduced by agriculture.47 On his part, Engels admitted that even Darwin was open tothe influence of the soil. He now accepted Trémaux’s hypothesis of ‘the influence of the“soil” on the emergence of races and consequently also of species’ as ‘extraordinarilyplausible’, but he insisted there was no final proof and he remained very sceptical aboutthe weight of the soil factor.48

Engels formulated the idea of environmental moulding of heredity as a principle. Inhis so-called Anti-Dühring, he praised Darwin for having discovered the hereditarybasis of the ‘characteristics of a race, variety or species’. But he complained that Darwinleft it in the dark how individual organisms acquire new hereditary characteristics in thefirst place: with Darwin, individual transformations emerge ‘out of nothing’. Engelsreferred to Ernst Haeckel for the suggestion that individual organisms acquire newcharacteristics by adapting to the environment.49

Engels was more interested in nutrition than in the soil as a factor conditioningheredity. In his 1876 essay on the contribution of labour to the emergence of thehuman species, he explained that the invention of hunting and fishing tools allowed

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proto-humans to switch from plants to a meat diet. This represented an ‘essential step inthe process of hominization’, because meat consumption provided the chemical materialsto enlarge the brain.50 Nutrition patterns were essential for racial differentiation. Engelsobserved in Origin of the Family that the rich meat and milk diet of the ‘Aryans andSemites’might account for the ‘superior development of both races’. Also, the vegetarianPueblo Indians of New Mexico had a ‘smaller brain’ than meat-eating Indians.51

In the Lamarckian universe, humans did not only adapt racially to the naturalconditions surrounding them, cultural adaptations too might become hereditary. Itwas again Engels who was the most explicit about this aspect of the Lamarckianmechanism. In his unpublished Dialectic of Nature, written over the period of 1873–1886, Engels wrote that ‘modern natural science’ accepted the ‘heredity of acquiredcharacteristics’. Once acquired, characteristics would be passed on to one’s offspringthrough heredity. Importantly, Engels gave this the racist twist that ‘with us’ childreneasily learned mathematical axioms, which their ancestors had already assimilated andto ‘a certain degree’ transferred to them by birth. On the contrary, a ‘Bushman orAustralian Negro’ could hardly learn the axioms, even if offered the proofs.52

The emergence of races: hybridization

Next to the influence of natural and social conditions on heredity, the second mechan-ism of race formation was hybridization, the mixing of blood, a process both Marx andEngels almost invariably regarded in a positive light.53 A text fragment compiled intoThe German Ideology discusses how the United States became the locus for the ‘mostadvanced social formation [Verkehrsform]’. This was one of the reasons: ‘Personalenergy of the individuals of specific nations – Germans and Americans – energythrough racial hybridization [Rassenkreuzung]’.54 The authors furthermore suggestedthat if one could improve ‘races of animals’, and even create new races through ‘racialhybridization’, why would that be impossible with humans?55

Engels seems to have been more preoccupied with hybridization than Marx. In theformer’s eyes, the mixing of blood of the various European ethnicities had a favourable effecton the temperaments of the modern European nations. In 1844, he asserted that the key tothe ‘English national character’ lay in the merger of ‘Teutons [Germanen] and Latins[Romanen]’. This combination of ‘Germanic [germanischen] and Latin elements’ had causedthe ‘eternal anxiety’ of the English, while triggering their tremendous ‘energy’, which Engels,again, straightforwardly called the ‘source of colonial ventures [Kolonisation], shipping,industry’.56 Thus, Engels traced the English national character, and even their industrialand trade successes, to hereditary character induced by ethnic merger.

In a 30 September 1893 letter to Laura Lafargue, Engels praised the Austrians as a‘racial mixture [Rassenmischung]’ of Germans, a ‘Celtic [. . .] tribe’ and a ‘Slav element’.The fusion of the ‘blood of the three main European races’ made the Austriantemperament ‘livelier and more excitable than that of the Germans who are lessmixed with other races’. The Austrians were therefore more prone to ‘great deeds’.57

Such examples can easily be multiplied. Engels seems to have regarded the positiveeffects of racial hybridization almost as an established principle. In 1866, he postulatedthat, in general, it produces ‘Change in the otherwise too monotonous uniformity ofnational character’.58 In Origin of the Family, he approvingly quoted the American

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anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, to the effect that mixtures of blood in tribalsocieties produce a ‘physically as well as mentally stronger race’. When two tribesmixed, ‘the new skulls and brains naturally widened out, until they encompassed thecompetences of both’.59 This brand of racism, favouring hybridization rather thanpurity, harmonized quite well with Romantic-nationalist notions of nations as ethnicfusions.

Innate character

A human group is only made subject to racialization if the inferior or superior traitsthat are being attributed to it are held to be innate. Otherwise, even the most horren-dous comments on the alleged character of particular nations or skin-colour groups donot qualify as racist. That collectively possessed character qualities might become innatewas regarded as a matter of course by Marx and Engels.

Let us turn first to the two men’s notorious comments on the small Slav nations ofthe Habsburg Empire. These comments were made in reaction to what they perceivedas a counter-revolutionary position assumed by these nations in 1848–1849. TheCzechs, Slovenes, Croats and others were afraid of being swallowed up by theGerman and Hungarian national revolutions. They preferred accommodation withHabsburg rule to minority status in a new national state.

Three articles written by Engels are the most illuminating: the early 1849 ‘TheMagyar struggle’ and ‘Democratic Panslavism’, and ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany’, the last one written in 1851 and 1852.60 Once again, Engelswas more engaged with this problematic than Marx, but in allowing the last article toappear over his signature, the latter did show his agreement.61 Engels attributed thecounter-revolutionary role of particular nations to their inability to play a productive,state-bearing role in history.62 He referred to their small size and fragmented condi-tions, while casting nations such as Slavonians, Poles and Czechs as ‘essentially anagricultural race’, without proper appreciation for trade and industry.63

The terms in which Engels contrasted the South Slavs, Rumanians and others, withthe Germans, Magyars and Poles, leave little doubt that he was talking about innatequalities. He praised the latter three nations as the only ‘viable [lebensfähig]’ nationsand as the ‘bearers of progress’.64 Engels believed that the whole history of CentralEurope testified to the ‘physical and intellectual power of the German nation’.65 Bycontrast, he depreciated the ‘Slavonic race’, whose only ‘energetic’ part he believed to bethe Russians.66 The small Slav nations lacked what he called ‘historical thrust force[Aktionskraft]’.67 Since the days of Charlemagne, these nations had failed to show aninterest in intervening in history but instead had allowed themselves to fall intosubjection to the Germans and Magyars, whose historical task it had been to imposecivilization upon them.68 That 8 million Slavs had allowed themselves to be dominatedby 4 million Magyars for a full 800 years indicated who were the ‘more viable andenergetical’ nations.69

A couple of years later, Engels and Marx wrote that the Balkans were populated by a‘conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is theleast fit for progress and civilization’. Of all these ‘races’, the Turks seemed to be the‘most competent to hold the supremacy’, but that too had now become questionable.70

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Engels wrote in 1866 that small nations lacking the ‘energy’ to make history must allowthemselves to be assimilated into ‘large, undoubtedly viable [lebenkräftige]’ and ‘morepowerful’ nations, possessing more ‘vital strength’.71 Obviously, then, Marx and Engelsbelieved ‘races’ differed in their innate levels of viability and energy.72

Yet, this image can be nuanced. Overall, Marx and Engels valued the European racesmore than non-Europeans. Tellingly, Engels attributed the defeats of the Asian empiresto the superior ‘enterprise of the European race’.73 However, both Marx and Engelssuggested that all races had positive as well as negative inborn qualities. The latterinsisted that the original Germans had been a ‘highly talented Aryan tribe’, but hepoked fun at the idea that the tribes that once had rejuvenated Europe possessed a‘magical power inborn in the Germanic tribe’.74 He regarded ‘physical and mentalclumsiness’ as an ‘inherited trait of the Germanic race’.75 The ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ had a‘sluggish brain [schwerfällig von Gehirn]’.76

Marx believed the ‘Hindoos’ suffered from ‘natural languor’. But he also regardedthem as a noble people, living in a country where ‘our languages, our religions’originated. The Indians possessed a ‘particular aptitude for accommodating themselvesto entirely new labour’, ‘great industrial energy’, as well as remarkable ‘mathematical’talents.77

Marx and Engels reserved particularly negative comments for black-skinned people,who, the latter suggested in so many words, stood a degree closer to animals than therest of humanity.78 Engels assumed ‘savages’ had reverted to a ‘more animal-likecondition’ through ‘regression of the organism [körperlicher Rückbildung]’.79 On oneoccasion Marx indicated that the form of the skull of the ‘Jewish nigger’, FerdinandLassalle, betrayed his descent. ‘Now, this way of linking a Jewish and a Germanicelement with the Negro substance is bound to produce an extraordinary product. Thepushiness of the fellow is also niggerlike’.80 This passage is again particularly tellingbecause Marx was tracing character, ‘pushiness’, directly to skull and race.

But Marx also had a very low opinion of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalitédes races humaines, ‘An essay on the inequality of the human races’ (1853, 1855). In a 5March 1870 letter to Laura and Paul Lafargue, he ridiculed the book for deifying thewhite race and demonizing the black race for evil reasons.81

With the appearance of Origin of Species, there arose a powerful tendency in theEuropean academic world to deny that non-European ‘races’ were capable of rapid‘improvement’. Lamarckians continued to find improvement possible, but the processwould be a long-drawn-out one and require intense effort on the part of the Europeanimperialists.82

What would Marx’s and Engels’s position have been on the question of improve-ment? They surely believed that innate deficiencies made some races unfit for properself-development. Notoriously, they cheered the ‘energetical Yankees’ for wrestingCalifornia from the ‘lazy Mexicans, who didn’t know what to do with it’. TheAmericans could be trusted to increase the population, to create cities and to openup shipping and rail connections, something the Mexicans would be unable toaccomplish.83

But as adherents of the environmental hypothesis, they could not easily accept thatany race would be beyond redemption. Given time, even inborn deficiencies could beovercome. In 1853, Marx scathingly referred to the ‘hereditary stupidity’ of the Chinese,

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but all the same indicated that the Opium War and the Taiping rebellion now seemedto be arousing them from that hereditary infliction.84 Apparently, even heredity was notcast in iron.

In some cases, for example the conflicts within the Habsburg Empire referred toearlier, lack of belief in the chances of regeneration of the less energetic races was strongenough for Marx and Engels to reject what would have been the emancipatory position.But in fairness that was mostly not the case. Once they became convinced of the need tosupport India’s struggle against British imperialism, they became supportive – ‘naturallanguor’ or not.

Both men strongly supported abolitionism. Then again, the question of race remainedan issue for them: whether the ‘negroes’ were capable of emancipation at all did representa real question. In a 14 June 1853 letter to Engels, Marx indicated that, in the past, Jamaicahad been importing new negro slaves all the time, making for a population mostlyconsisting of ‘newly imported barbarians’. On the contrary, the ‘present negro generationin America [represents] an indigenous product, more or less turned into Yankees, Englishspeaking etc. and therefore becomes capable of emancipation’.85

Racialization of classes

Marx and Engels even racialized social classes. For the character of classes to turninnate, such groups would have to be subjected to particular conditions long enough fortheir heredity to be affected. That might be a difficult condition to be met, particularlyin periods of social mobility, migration and urbanization. But on occasion, Marx andEngels did loosely refer to classes as the ‘races’ constituting a nation.86 We also have theformer’s intriguing 1853 observation: ‘The classes and the races, too weak to master thenew conditions of life, must give way’.87

No doubt, Marx and Engels correlated character profiles of particular classes pri-marily with the position they occupied in the production process. For example, thebourgeois psychology expressed the system’s profit orientation. They associated theindustrial proletarians’ allegedly energetical character with their modern conditions,primarily with the large scale: workers lived in large cities, worked in compact masses inlarge factories and tended to team up in large associations for joint struggle.

Yet, the tendency for Marx and Engels to racialize social classes was unmistakable.They regarded the bourgeoisie, in particular the German bourgeoisie, as a cowardly,unheroical class, whose character weakness had been displayed all along. Even in theirrevolutionary heyday, the bourgeois had left the actual fighting to the popular classes.On one occasion, Engels referred to the ‘abnormally inbred [ausgebildeten] character’ ofthe cowardly German bourgeois strata, which he regarded as the fruit of an ‘interrupted,arrested [zurückgedrängten] development’ going back to the Thirty-Years’ War.88 Onanother, he called the bourgeoisie’s lack of energy ‘inherited’ [ererbten] in so manywords.89

Both Marx and Engels referred to the working class as a ‘race’ quite frequently,mainly when they were making the point that the capitalists must provide the workerswith the wages to allow their ‘race’ to survive.90 Engels defined the proletariat as a class‘with a courageous nature [ihrer Natur nach mutige]’.91 For the most striking testimonyof racialization of the workers, we must turn to his 1845 Condition of the Working Class

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in England. According to the author, the character of the English workers was first of allmarked by their work experience in large factories and their urban life conditions.92 Buthe identified the injection of ‘Irish blood’ into the ‘workers’ race’ as an additionalfactor.93 Irish immigrants transferred their ‘passionate, lively [. . .] essence’ to theEnglish workers, crowding out the latter’s ‘cold English character’ through ‘racial fusion[Stammverschmelzung]’. Incidentally, this offers further confirmation of Engels’s gen-erally positive appreciation of racial hybridization. Engels continued that, by now,English workers and bourgeois spoke different dialects and had acquired differentideas, morals and politics. Stunningly, he concluded that ‘the working class graduallybecame a completely different people [Volk] than the English bourgeoisie. [. . .] They aretwo completely different peoples, as different as racial difference [Unterschied der Rasse]can make them’.94

I found no other example of the racialization of class in these crass terms. But Marxdid repeatedly indicate that the proletariat’s miserable living and working conditionsmight turn that class into a hereditarily degenerated race. In an October 1864 speech, heapprovingly quoted from a report on child labour, to the effect that a ‘physically andmentally degenerated population’ was growing up: the ‘progressive deterioration of therace is inevitable’. Intermarriage with ‘more healthy races’ might slow the process down,though.95 If degeneration could be inhibited by intermarriage with healthier races,Marx was obviously assuming the degenerated mental qualities were in the process ofturning innate. On another occasion, he had suggested that the process of degenerationof the worker’s ‘race’ would take ‘a few generations’.96 For obvious reasons, Marx andEngels were racializing classes less frequently than skin-colour and ethnic groups, butthe interesting thing is that they engaged in this at all.

Michel Foucault suggested in 1976 that, in providing class with race-like features,Marx and Engels may have been inspired by the concept of ‘race war’ as it was nurturedby French historians, most prominently by Augustin Thierry.97 Like other Romanticnationalists, Thierry regarded modern nations as products of fusion of a number ofancient racial–tribal entities into new, reconciliated wholes. But he gave a particularlytense, class twist to this idea. In Thierry’s hypothesis, the modern class strugglesdividing the French nation continued to reflect ancient struggles between the originalethnic stocks. Even though the two ‘races’ had harmoniously fused in the course oftime, the nobility and the bourgeoisie could still trace their origins to fifth-centuryFrankish conquerors and the ancient Gauls subjected by them.98

Marx and Engels nurtured a degree of admiration for Thierry. The former acknowl-edged Thierry’s role, as well as the role of François Guizot and other ‘bourgeois’historians, in the formation of the class-struggle idea.99 Marx furthermore acceptedthat, in some countries, serfdom had emerged as the fruit of ‘conquest and racedualism’.100 Engels agreed that, even though it offered too neat an explanation of therise of serfdom, Thierry’s theory of conquest was valid.101 Even so, it seems unlikelythat either man was much in debt to Thierry. Whereas the latter saw race turning intoclass, Marx and Engels were, on the contrary, turning class into race. They wereracializing social classes for the same reason they were racializing other groups: ifcollective characters in the course of time could become innate, there was no funda-mental reason why the mechanism that worked in the case of skin-colour and ethnicgroups under sufficiently stable conditions could not work for social classes as well.

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Concluding remarks

One searches in vain for a systematic theory of race inMarx’s and Engels’s writings. Neitherman ever spelled out his views on this issue in a single, compact essay. But in the light of theevidence presented here, it cannot be maintained that their views lacked coherence and thatthey were just repeating current stereotypes out of hand. Otherwise put, even if theirobservations reflected all too common prejudices, it does not follow that they could nothave taken them very seriously. Their observations were numerous, and they appeared inall types of their writings – from notes and private letters to major published works. Mostimportantly, they do not strike one as thoughtless or arbitrary at all. There is enoughpattern to them to allow a reconstruction of the underlying views that held them together.

Implicitly, Marx and Engels worked with a definition of race as a sufficiently largegroup of people sporting an innate physical and mental profile of its own. Skin-colourgroups, nations, ethnicities and social classes might all come to display such ‘racial’features. One of the reasons why they never systematically expounded their views onrace would have been that they found the ‘Lamarckian’ assumptions underlying themalmost self-evident. It would have been a matter of course for them that humans livingand working under the same natural and social conditions for a sufficient period of timetend to grow certain shared innate character profiles.

While Marx paid most attention to the strictly natural conditions, the soil as a race-creating factor, Engels was more interested in factors with cultural and social connota-tions, such as the quality of food and the heredity of learned behaviour. Their differencesmust be seen in terms of accent and interest, though, not of hard disagreements. Forexample, in racializing the working class, Marx too referred to socially defined factors, i.e.the workers’ atrocious living and working conditions. Even in the discussion aboutTrémaux, the two men reached some sort of very fragile and conditional consensus.They agreed (and probably found this once again utterly self-evident) that races would befurther modified through hybridization, i.e. through the mixing of blood, a point again inwhich Engels was more interested than Marx.

For present-day standards, the racism displayed by Marx and Engels was outrageousand even extreme. For nineteenth-century standards, though, it was not. The two men’spreoccupation with the alleged degeneration of races and with environmental factorsstrongly suggests that they sympathized with the monogenetic, not with the polygenetic,hypothesis. Their enthusiasm about the beneficial effects of racial hybridization on thetemper of nations placed them in one camp with the Romantic Nationalists rather thanwith racial-purity adepts such as Gobineau. Again, the Lamarckian proposition ofcircumstance remoulding heredity allowed them to predict the erasure of racial dispa-rities in the future. Most likely, they expected this happy turn of events with the newdawn of world communism. More limited changes in inherited profile might even beeffected within a few generations.

Also, Marx and Engels did not follow the tradition from Linnaeus to Gobineau toproduce a formalized hierarchical classification of human races into three or four types.If races represented only temporary modifications of the species, and miscegenationworked out well, no purpose would have been served in strictly delimiting them.Furthermore, they accepted that all ‘races’ represented mixtures of negative and positivefeatures.

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Even so, Marx and Engels were endowing ‘races’with inferior and superior qualities allthe time. Whites were more intelligent than blacks, the Aryans and Semites more capablethan other races, the South Slavs were lacking in the innate energies and thrust displayedby Magyars and Germans. Whereas the Americans could, the Mexicans could noteconomically develop California. Whereas the English industrial and colonial triumphswere partly due to the innate character of that nation, the Asians were defeated becausethey lacked the entrepreneurial spirit of the European races. And so on.

It goes without saying that neither man accepted the Gobineau thesis of race as masterconcept and main motive force of history. Marx and Engels conceptualized race as nomore than one element of humanity’s natural conditions. But they did give it a specificplace in their materialist interpretation of history: by defining race as part of the naturalconditions upon which production rests and depends, they made it theoretically possiblefor the development of national economies and labour productivity to be influenced bythe racial human material available. Even though race never became history’s mainmotive force, it mattered. ‘Races’ endowed with superior qualities would serve as gen-erators of production; the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. Thus, in eitherinhibiting or boosting the process of economic development, race to an extent modifiedthe dynamics of history as conceptualized in the theory of historical materialism.

Notes

1. Carlos Moore, ‘Were Marx and Engels white racists?: the prolet-Aryan outlook ofMarxism’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 19 (1974–75), pp. 125–56; Nathaniel Weyl,‘Notes on Karl Marx’s racial philosophy of politics and history’, The Mankind Quarterly(July 1977), pp. 59–70; idem, Karl Marx: Racist (New York: Arlington House, 1979). For amore balanced overview of racist and anti-Semitic elements in Marx and Engels, anddifferences between the two men: W.H. Chaloner, W.O. Henderson, ‘Marx/Engels andracism’, Encounter (July 1975), pp. 18–23.

2. See for example: Michael Löwy, Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question(London, Sterling: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 22–7; Kevin B. Anderson,Marx at the Margins: OnNationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, London: The University ofChicago Press, 2010), pp. 49–52. See also Horace Davis, ‘Nations, colonies and social classes:the position of Marx and Engels’, Science & Society 29 (1) (1965), pp. 26–43.

3. Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Ignaz Brand, 1907),pp. 166, 236–7.

4. Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: The National Question in theRevolution of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986), especially chapter 8; Löwy,Fatherland, op. cit., Ref. 2, especially pp.23–7; Anderson, Marx at the Margins, op.cit.,Ref. 2, for example, p.52.

5. Ephraim Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis(London, Boulder: Pluto Press, 1994), chapter 1.

6. In his study of Eurocentrism, Samir Amin discusses Marx at length, but not the questionof Marx’s racism. In Amin’s view, Eurocentrism was more a peculiarity of later Marxiststhan of Marx himself: Eurocentrism. Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique ofEurocentrism and Culturalism. Second Edition (New York: Monthly Review Press; CapeTown: Pambazuka Press, 2011), pp. 191, 223–4. Biko Agozino flatly denies any racism onMarx’s part. This scholar even casts Marx as father of an ‘African paradigm’: ‘The Africanparadigm in Capital: the debts of Karl Marx to people of African descent’, Review ofAfrican Political Economy, 41(140) (2014). pp. 172–84.

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7. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. An Essay toward a History of the Partwhich Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880(Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1935); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race. A Studyin Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism. TheMaking of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983), pp. 64–77. For theMarxist sociology of race and racism from the 1970s to 1990s, see John Solomos, ‘Varietiesof Marxist conceptions of “race”, class and the state: a critical analysis’, in John Rex andDavid Mason (Eds) Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1986), pp. 84–109; Robert Miles, ‘Apropos the idea of “race” ... again’,in Les Back and John Solomos (Eds), Theories of Race and Racism. A Reader. SecondEdition (London, New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 180–98, and editorial introduction;James A. Geschwender and Rhonda F. Levine, ‘Race. Classical and recent theoreticaldevelopments in the Marxist analysis of race and ethnicity’, in Patrick McGuire andDonald McQuarie (Eds), From the Left Bank to the Mainstream. Historical Debates andContemporary Research in Marxist Sociology (New York: General Hall, 1994), pp. 66–85;John Solomos and Les Back, ‘Marxism, racism, and ethnicity’, American BehavioralScientist, 38(3) (1995), pp. 407–20. For a more recent Marxist sociology of racism: MikeCole, Racism. A Critical Analysis (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

8. Weyl, ‘Notes’, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 60–1.9. Andrzej Walicki argues that chauvinist nationalism is compatible with historical materi-

alism, in that privileging certain nations is not fundamentally different from privilegingcertain classes: Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of theCommunist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 152–67.

10. Solomon F. Bloom, The World of Nations: A Study of the National Implications in theWork of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), chapter 2.

11. Iring Fetscher, ‘Karl Marx on human nature’, Social Research 40(3) (1973), p. 444.12. See M.M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History (Cambridge M.: Harvard University

Press, 1948), chapter 4 and p. 313; Diane Paul, ‘“In the interests of civilization”: Marxistviews of race and culture in the nineteenth century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 42(1)(1981), pp. 118, 124–5. See also: Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution inGerman Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco, London, Bethesda:International scholars Publications, 1999), p. 43.

13. Paul, ‘Interests’, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 137–8.14. Amy E. Martin, ‘Blood transfusions. Constructions of Irish radical difference, the English

working class and revolutionary possibility in the work of Carlyle and Engels’, VictorianLiterature and Culture, 31(1) (2004), pp. 85, 95–8. See also Matthias Bohlender, ‘“. . .um dieliberale Bourgeoisie aus ihrem eignen Munde zu schlagen”. Friedrich Engels und die Kritikim Handgemenge’, Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2007 (Berlin: Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung, 2008), pp. 9–33.

15. Regina Roth, ‘Engels’ Irlandbild in seiner Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England von 1845,Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2011 (Berlin: Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung, 2012), pp. 116–7, 124–8.

16. This text was later compiled of fragments written by Marx and Engels during 1845 and1846. For its complex history, see Inge Taubert and Hans Pelger (Eds), Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004); Terrell Carver, ‘The German Ideologynever took place’, History of Political Thought, 31(1) (2010), pp. 107–27.

17. See Miles, ‘Apropos’, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 180; George M. Frederickson, Racism. A ShortHistory (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 156; Robert Miles andMalcolm Brown, Racism. Second Edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 58–9.

18. See Miles and Brown, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 60.19. For similar definitions: Frederickson, Racism, op.cit., Ref. 17, p. 5; David M. Newman, Sociology.

Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life (Los Angeles etc.: Pine Forge Press, 2010), p. 382.20. For the term ‘racialization’: Miles, ‘Apropos’, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 195. See also Frederickson,

Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 154–6.

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21. For this argument, see Solomos and Back, ‘Marxism, racism’, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 414;Frederickson, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 7–8; Ali Rattansi, Racism. A Very ShortIntroduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 88, 94–107; Back and Solomos,Theories of Race, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 21; Miles and Brown, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 61–4.

22. Maxim Mikulak, ‘Darwinism, Soviet genetics, and Marxism-Leninism’, Journal of theHistory of Ideas, 31(3) (1970), pp. 359–60; Paul, ‘Interests’, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 116–7;Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge MA., London:Harvard University Press, 2016), chapter 2.

23. Paul, ‘Interests’, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 119–20.24. These paragraphs are based on: Michael Banton, ‘The idiom of race. A critique of present-

ism’, in Back and Solomos, Theories of Race, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 58–62; Bernard Boxill (Ed.),Race and Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), introduction, especially pp. 17–19; Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who invented the concept of race?’, in Back and Solomos, Theoriesof Race, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 84–97; Frederickson, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 53–70; Miles andBrown, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 39–40; Rattansi, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 23–36, 54;Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race. The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea(Cambridge MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2014), chapter 1.

25. Bernasconi, ‘Who invented’, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 85; Back and Solomos, Theories of Race, op.cit., Ref. 7, pp. 96–7; Frederickson, Racism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 69–70; Rattansi, Racism, op.cit., Ref. 21, p. 36.

26. John Hutchinson, ‘Cultural nationalism’, in John Breuilly (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook ofthe History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199209194.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199209194-e-3?print=pdf (accessed 20 June 2016), pp. 4–9. For the prehistory of theidea of national character among Enlightenment philosophers, see Joep Leerssen, ‘Thepoetics and anthropology of national character (1500–2000)’, in Manfred Beller and JoepLeerssen (Eds) Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation ofNational Characters. A Critical Survey (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 69–75; Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 66–70.

27. Joep Leerssen, ‘Nation and ethnicity’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Eds) TheContested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 78–82. See also: See Erica Benner,‘Nationalism: intellectual origins’, in Breuilly, The Oxford Handbook of the History ofNationalism, op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 3.

28. Benner, ‘Nationalism’, op. cit, Ref. 27, pp. 13–16.29. ‘Die deutsche Ideologie’, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol.3 (Berlin: Dietz

Verlag, 1978), pp.20–1 [MEW].30. MEW, vol.3, p. 410.31. ‘Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlass. Einleitung zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie’,

MEW, vol.13, p. 640.32. MEW, vol. 23, p. 535.33. MEW, vol. 25, p. 800.34. Ibid, p. 802.35. MEW, vol. 39, pp. 205–6.36. MEW, Ergänzungsband, part 1: p. 578.37. See Andrew Chitty, ‘The basis of the state in the Marx of 1842’, in Douglas Moggach (Ed.)

The New Hegelians. Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge etc.:Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 220–41.

38. MEW, vol. 19, p.15.39. See for this point: Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York,

London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013), p. 412.

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40. For the foundational aspect of the biological in historical materialism, see Joseph Fracchia,‘Beyond the human-nature debate; human corporeal organisation as the “first fact” ofhistorical materialism’, Historical Materialism, 13(1) (2005), pp.39, 45–6.

41. Sperber attributes Marx’s interest in race, and in the works of Darwin, Thomas Huxley andothers, to his openness to the new positivistic-scientific spirit of the mid-nineteenthcentury: Karl Marx, op.cit., Ref. 39, pp. 389–99, 413.

42. MEW, vol.3: p.33. Emphasis added.43. Mikulak suggests that Marx leaned towards a ‘geographical solution’ and Engels towards a

‘cultural solution’ with the principal role for labour: ‘Darwinism’, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 366.44. MEW, vol.31, pp. 126–7.45. Marx to Engels, 7 August 1866: MEW, vol. 31, pp. 248–9.46. Engels to Marx, 2 October 1866: MEW, vol. 31, p. 256.47. Marx to Engels, 3 October 1866: MEW, vol. 31, p.258.48. Engels to Marx, 5 October 1866: MEW, vol.31, pp. 259–60. The Trémaux exchange has

been widely discussed. See Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation, op. cit., Ref. 12, p.70; RalphColp, ‘The contacts between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin’, Journal of the History ofIdeas, 35(2) (1974), p. 330; Weyl, ‘Notes’, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 63–8; Paul, ‘Interests’, op. cit.,Ref. 12, pp. 120–4; John L. Stanley and Ernest Zimmermann, ‘On the alleged differencesbetween Marx and Engels’, Political Studies, 32 (1984), pp. 233–4; Weikart, SocialistDarwinism, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 29–30, 36, 43; Sperber, Karl Marx, op. cit., Ref. 39, pp.412–3. Horace Davis inaccurately suggests that Engels set Marx straight on Trémaux:‘Nations, colonies’, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 33. Mikulak goes too far in suggesting that Engelstotally rejected Trémaux: ‘Darwinism’, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 365.

49. ‘Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft’ (1876–8), MEW, vol. 20, p. 65.50. MEW, vol. 20, pp. 448–9.51. ‘Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats’ (1884), MEW, vol. 21, pp.

33–4. In his 1880–2 notebooks, Marx excerpted the following passage from Lewis HenryMorgan’s Ancient Society: ‘The Iriquois brain approached in volume the Aryan average;eloquent in oratory, vindictive in war, indomitable in perseverance, they have gained aplace in history’: Lawrence Krader (Ed.) The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Studiesof Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), p. 173. Paul suggests that,in taking nutrition patterns rather than the soil as the decisive trigger of racial differentia-tion, Engels may have listened to Morgan. He might also have taken Ludwig Feuerbach’saphorism literally: ‘Der Mensch ist was er isst [People are what they eat]’: ‘Interests’, op.cit., Ref. 12, pp. 124–5.

52. MEW, vol. 20, p. 529.53. Cuvier’s and Darwin’s views on hybridization were another issue discussed in the Trémaux

exchange: MEW, vol. 31, pp. 248, 257, 259.54. MEW, vol. 3, p. 73.55. MEW, vol. 3, p. 410.56. ‘Die Lage Englands I. Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert’: MEW, vol. 1, pp. 552–4.57. MEW, vol. 39, p. 125. Compare: 11 October 1893 to Victor Adler, ibid., pp. 135–6.58. ‘Was hat die Arbeiterklasse mit Polen zu tun?’: MEW, vol. 16, p. 158.59. MEW, vol. 21, p. 52.60. ‘Der magyarische Kampf’: MEW, vol. 6, pp. 165–76; ‘Der demokratische Panslawismus’,

vol.6, pp. 270–86; ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany’, in Karl Marx andFrederick Engels, Collected Works [CW], vol.11 (New York: International Publishers,1979), pp. 3–96.

61. According to Löwy, there is nothing to show that Marx agreed with Engels’s theory ofnon-historical peoples, to be found in these articles: Fatherland, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 22.Anderson argues that Marx must have been in general agreement, not only because heallowed one of them to appear under his own name but also because he helped Engels tosee them published: Marx at the Margins, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 49, 261.

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62. Engels referred to Hegel as the author of the theory of historical and unhistorical nations:‘Magyarische Kampf’, MEW, vol. 6, pp. 172, 174. For this theory of Hegel’s, see JosephMcCarney, Hegel on History (New York, London: Routledge, 2000), chapters 9 and 10.

63. ‘Revolution und Counter-Revolution’: CW, vol. 11, p. 44.64. ‘Magyarische Kampf’: MEW, vol. 6, p.168.65. ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, CW, vol. 11, p. 71.66. ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, ibid., p. 47.67. ‘Magyarische Kampf’: MEW, vol. 6, pp. 172, 174.68. See ‘Magyarische Kampf’, vol. 6, pp. 169–70; ‘Demokratische Panslawismus’, vol. 6, p. 275;

‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, CW, vol. 11, pp. 43–6, 70–1.69. ‘Demokratische Panslawismus’, MEW, vol. 6, p.278.70. ‘British Politics. – Disraeli. – The refugees. – Mazzini in London. – Turkey’ (7 April 1853),

CW, vol. 12, p. 7.71. ‘Was hat die Arbeiterklasse’: MEW, vol. 16, pp. 157–8.72. In 1855–6, Engels was working on a series of articles about racial relations. The articles

have not been preserved, but Engels’s prospectus has been, and it begins as follows: ‘Latins[Romanen], Teutons, Slavs. 2000 years of struggle of the first 2, eliminated by civilisation,revolution & impossibility of lasting rule by one tribe over another’. Engels continued thatthe ‘third great race’, the Slavs, was now demanding hegemony over Europe: Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), vol. I, 14 (Amsterdam: InternationaleMarx-Engels-Stiftung, 2001), p.789. See also p. 1530. Sperber (Karl Marx, op. cit., Ref.39) suggests that this might indicate that Engels (and Marx) saw ‘racial differencesprimarily as a feature of pre-capitalist societies’ and that the ‘continuing significance ofrace in Russia’ would signify its continuing backwardness. It seems to me, however, thatEngels suggested merely that the struggle for hegemony between Latins and Teutons, nottheir racial differences as such, had been overcome.

73. ‘Russia’s Successes in the Far East’ (November 1858), CW, vol. 16, p. 83.74. ‘Ursprung’, MEW, vol. 21, p. 149.75. ‘Aus den Reiseeindrücken über Amerika’ (1888): MEW, vol. 21, p. 467.76. 31 December 1892, Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, MEW, vol. 38, p. 560.77. ‘The future results of British rule in India’ (8 August 1853): CW, vol. 12, p. 220–1.78. Engels to Laura Lafargue, 26 April 1887, MEW, vol. 36, p. 645.79. ‘Anteil der Arbeit’, vol. 20, p. 445.80. Marx to Engels, 30 July 1862: MEW, vol. 30, p. 259.81. MEW, vol. 32, pp. 67–8. See also Sperber, Karl Marx, op. cit., Ref. 39, p. 410. Marx also

qualified it as a stupid remark on the part of Henry Summer Maine (Lectures on the EarlyHistory of Institutions, 1875) that, while there existed a ‘wide separation between the Aryanrace and races of other stocks’, the difference between ‘Aryan sub-races’ was minor: Krader,Ethnological Notebooks, 290. He also poked fun at an observation in John Lubbock’s 1870The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man that the belief in theimmortal soul was confined to the so-called ‘highest (?) races of mankind’ and that evenan ‘intelligent black’ could not grasp that concept: Krader, Ethnological Notebooks, op. cit.,Ref. 51, p. 349.

82. See for example: Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the HistoricalImagination (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 5.

83. ‘Demokratische Panslawismus’, MEW, vol. 6, p. 273.84. ‘Revolution in China and in Europe’ (14 June 1853): CW, vol. 12, p. 94.85. MEW, vol. 28, p. 266. Compare Engels’s 15 July 1865 letter to Marx: vol. 31, p. 128.86. See for example: ‘Montesquieu LVI’ (Marx, 22 January 1849): MEW, vol. 6, p. 191;

‘Züchtigung der Soldaten’ (Marx/Engels, 1855): vol. 11, p. 511; ‘Theorien über denMehrwert’, vol. 3 (Marx, written 1862–3): vol. 26.3, p. 325.

87. ‘Forced emigration. – Kossuth and Mazzini. – The refugee question. – Election bribery inEngland. – Mr. Cobden’: CW, vol. 11, p. 531.

88. 5 June 1890 letter to Paul Ernst: MEW, vol. 37, p. 412.

72 E. VAN REE

89. ‘Die Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte’ (written 1887–8): MEW, vol. 21, p. 431.90. See for example: Marx’s 1844 manuscripts: MEW, Ergänzungsband, part 1, p. 471; ‘Die Lage

der arbeitenden Klasse in England’ (1845), vol. 2, p. 311; ‘Das Elend der Philosophie’ (Marx,written 1846–7), vol. 4, p. 83; ‘Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritisierende Moral’ (Marx,1847), vol. 4, p. 348; ‘Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei’ (Marx/Engels, 1848), vol. 4, p.469; ‘Lohnarbeit und Kapital’ (Marx, 1849), vol. 6, p. 406; ‘Theorien über den Mehrwert’, vol.3, 26.3, p. 325; ‘Das Kapital’, vol. 1, MEW, vol. 23, pp. 186, 534; ‘[Konspekt über] “DasKapital” von Karl Marx. Erster Band’ (Engels, written 1868), vol. 16, p. 261.

91. ‘Die preussische Militärfrage und die deutsche Arbeiterpartei’ (written 1865), MEW, vol.16, p. 77.

92. MEW, vol. 2, pp. 350–1.93. Ibid, p. 281.94. Ibid, p. 351. See also pp. 430–1.95. ‘Inauguraladresse der Internationalen Arbeiter-Assoziation’: MEW, vol. 16, p. 8. See also

‘Das Kapital’, vol.1, MEW, vol. 23, p. 285; ‘Lage der arbeitenden Klasse’, MEW, vol. 2,p.295. For the German workers as a ‘bureaucratically drilled [eingeschulte] race’, see Marx’sletter to Engels dated 26 September 1868, vol. 32, p. 168.

96. ‘Ökonomisches Manuskript 1861–1863’, MEW, vol. 43, p. 353.97. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must be Defended’. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76

(London etc.: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 49–85, see especially p. 79.98. See for race, conquest, class and Thierry: M. Seliger, ‘Race-thinking during the

Restoration’, Journal of the History of Ideas 19(2) (1958), especially pp. 275–7; LionellGossman, Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography: History and Theory, Studies in thePhilosophy of History, xv, no. 4 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), chapter 3,pp. 23–4; Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 56; Chris Manias,Race, Science, and The Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France andGermany (New York, London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–12, 79, 107, 135–6.

99. Letter to J. Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852: MEW, vol. 28, p. 504. See also letter to Engels, 27July 1854, vol. 28, pp. 381–2.

100. Letter to Engels, 30 October 1856: MEW, vol. 29, p. 82.101. Letter to Marx, 22 December 1882: MEW, vol. 35, p. 137.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Pepijn Brandon, Terrell Carver, Artemy Kalinovsky, Joep Leerssen, IanThatcher and James White, who read earlier drafts of this paper and whose comments helped meimportantly to reformulate my argument. He also wishes to thank one of the anonymous refereesfor his very useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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